Many, many years ago (though not in a galaxy far, far away), I spent ten years as a member of the Alaska Children’s Choir.
Originally founded by Renda Horn and Julie Baxley in 1979 as the Anchorage Girl’s Choir, the Anchorage Boy’s Choir was formed a few years later as a sibling organization, and I was one of the founding members. The two eventually merged into the Anchorage Girl’s and Boy’s Choir, and over the years became first the Anchorage Children’s Choir, and eventually the Alaska Children’s Choir.
The founder and director for many of the years I was in the choir was Renda Horn, a wonderful, energetic woman with more life bottled up inside her than most other people I’ve ever known. She had a great love of both music and children, and was able to use these to corral a bunch of children into an internationally award winning children’s choir — and those of us in the choir were as fond of her as she was of us.
One year, probably around 1986 or ’87, the choir went on tour through England. I don’t remember the full itinerary anymore, but I do have quite a few good memories of the trip; from exiting a station on the London Underground to emerge practically at the base of Big Ben and being able to gaze up at it glowing golden in the sunset on a sunny evening, to one of the other choir members accidentally pulling the handle off of a cathedral door and being momentarily panicked when my father (who was chaperoning the trip) reminded him of the “you break it, you buy it” rule.
My strongest memory of the trip, though, revolves around a single song. Our show-stopper piece that year was a song called “The Rhythm of Life” — fun lyrics, an upbeat tempo, and a gorgeous arrangement that made every part fun to sing had quickly made it a favorite, and we’d all become quite fond of ending our concerts with this number.
We’d been doing quite a few performances over the course of the trip, were nearing the end of our stay in England, and emotions had been running a bit high as looking forward to returning home battled with the excitement of visiting a foreign country. One of our final concerts was in a little church in some town (whose name I have long since forgotten), and somewhat unusually, was a short performance during the church service — it may be that Renda or one of the other choir members had relations in this town and was able to set up this special performance, though I’m not entirely sure.
We sang a short selection of the pieces in our repertoire and, as had become standard, ended with “The Rhythm of Life”. We were all arranged on the steps in front of the altar, and as the song progressed, the clouds that had been obscuring the sky that morning parted, sending warm golden light through the windows of the church. The church building itself seemed to be acoustically perfect, taking our voices and wrapping them around us and the congregation and on up into the rafters and beyond. Renda’s smile grew wider as she watched “her kids” give the performance of a lifetime that day. Her eyes started to glisten, and soon started to overflow with tears of pure joy in the moment — and by the end of the song, most of the choir had joined her (and I’m not at all ashamed to admit that nearly twenty years later, I’m getting a bit misty eyed reliving the memory as I write this down).
We got a standing ovation that day — no small feat, given the stereotypical British reserve combined with our performing in the midst of a C of E service — and while the choir has received many standing ovations over the years, in my mind that has always been, and always will be, the standing ovation.
Over the years, that song (and that day) has popped into my head from time to time, nearly always guaranteeing a smile, no matter what I’m doing. This morning I came across an incredibly clever ad from Guinness (6Mb QT .mov, linked to the right) that uses an arrangement of “The Rhythm of Life” as its music track. Noticing a few differences in the lyrics from what I’d learned, I went searching to see what I could find out about the song.
